Environmental, Social and Governance Efforts at USP
USP Worldwide is committed to maintaining the highest standards when serving our customers and to giving back to communities across our global footprint. Our Values — Integrity, Accountability, Diversity and Customer Centricity — are the foundation of how we do business and drive many corporate responsibility efforts.
Our sustainability initiatives are focused on three high-level topics:
- Environmental – Energy use and waste control
- Social – Employee development, diversity and inclusion, community engagement, cybersecurity, and data privacy
- Governance – Corporate governance and Board structure
We look to amplify these efforts as we continue our corporate responsibility journey.
Environmental Initiatives
As a leader in digital payments software, we believe that our solutions deliver significant benefits to our environment. Our solutions eliminate the need for paper-based bills and payments, saving trees the world needs to provide oxygen, improve air quality and deliver other environmental benefits.
We also have initiatives around efficient energy use, such as converting our U.S. and Indian offices to LED lighting, which we believe has cut our lighting electrical load roughly in half. We utilize building management systems to help limit the use of air conditioning. And, we offer single-stream recycling in our U.S. offices, while globally, we encourage the use of reusable ceramic mugs or recyclable, compostable paper cups where possible.
Social Initiatives
USP works to ensure that our employees, customers and communities have the tools, access and opportunities to actively participate in the growing digital economy.
Some of our most impactful social initiatives support STEM Education, Gender Parity in Payments and Financial Inclusion. Our employees in the U.S., U.K. and South Africa have hosted coding camps and workshops to introduce middle school and high school students to opportunities in technology. USP is dedicated to promoting gender pay gap transparency as highlighted in our UK Gender Equality statement, and we support gender parity in payments as a global sponsor of Women in Payments (WIP) and as a participant in the organization’s annual symposia globally. In alignment with our Purpose to create global prosperity through real-time payments, USP supports Kiva, a non-profit organization that crowdfunds microloans to the underbanked to drive financial inclusion.
We are honored that our employees have received external recognition and awards, such as The Advocate for Women Award, the Most Influential Women in Payments and Forty Under 40.
Employee development and engagement opportunities include USP University, a learning portal with more than 10,000 learning assets on a wide range of topics, including technical, business, professional development and compliance. All USP employees complete compliance programs annually.
We are committed to ensuring transparency in how we use, collect, share and transfer our customers’ personal data. This information is accessible through our trust and privacy webpage. We comply with privacy laws all over the world, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Governance Initiatives
USP builds and maintains positive business relationships with our customers by adhering to a highly ethical set of standards that comply with laws and regulations worldwide. These standards are reflected in our corporate governance as well as policies such as the Anti-Slavery policy.
The USP Board of Directors is committed to a policy of inclusiveness and actively seeks out candidates with diversity characteristics like race gender and ethnicity as well as diversity in experience, expertise and other characteristics unique to individuals.
Our Board provides oversight of the effectiveness of USP’s risk management processes, while various Board committees oversee risk management in specific areas, such as assessing and mitigating financial risk as well as potential risk related to USP’s compensation policies and practices. USP’s management and Board follow a defined succession planning process to fill key business leadership positions as they become vacation.
We do not currently accept unsolicited funding requests, but if you have additional questions or feel your organization aligns with our goals, please email our corporate responsibility team.
